The passage in red was deleted from the version of this diary entry
in Walter Millis's edition of The Forrestal Diaries, which was published
at the height of the Cold War in 1951. (See p. 78 in that book.) This rather
extraordinary passage reflects Truman's relatively complaisant attitude
toward a Soviet-dominated Europe. The deletion of this passage made it
seem that American policy was much tougher at the time of Potsdam than
it actually was--a view that both left- and right-wing historians found
congenial, albeit for different reasons. This is a striking example of
the way a skewed documentary record distorted our understanding of basic
American policy in the immediate post-World War II period.